Ribeira Home Studio

The brief

• ·The brief was specific from the first conversation: a real, working studio inside a converted apartment room, but one that didn't look or feel like a commercial facility bolted into a home - and cork, sourced locally, had to be part of how it looked.
• ·It's a shared building, so footfall and impact noise reaching the apartment below mattered just as much as how the room itself sounded.

Approach

Portugal produces roughly half the world's cork supply, which means it gets proposed constantly as an acoustic material - usually on vague 'soundproofing' claims that don't survive contact with an actual project. The real picture is narrower and more useful. Cork's cellular structure - gas-filled cells bound by suberin - gives it low dynamic stiffness and genuinely useful internal damping, which is precisely what a floating floor needs: something that absorbs and bleeds off the energy of footfall before it ever reaches the building's structure.

Where cork does and doesn't help

• ·As an airborne absorber, cork underperforms - tested coefficients for standard tile sit well below open-cell foam or mineral wool across most of the speech and music range, so cork panelling on its own won't stop a room from ringing.
• ·Thicker formats change that picture somewhat: 30mm-plus panels register real low-to-mid absorption, behaving more like a broadband panel with an air gap behind it than a decorative finish.

Solution

Cork ended up doing exactly the job it's actually good at: a floating floor build-up decoupling the room from the apartment below, and thick cork panelling as a resilient layer behind the wall finish. Broadband absorption - the part actually responsible for controlling the room's own modes and reflections - was specified separately and sized properly. Cork stayed the finish and the secondary damping layer, not a stand-in for treatment it was never going to deliver, which is how the room got both the sound and the look the client asked for in the same build.